


Postcards (Care of Brooklyn)

by Tawabids



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: And overthinks, Bucky doesn't know how to talk to boys, Fluff, Happy Ending, M/M, Non-powered AU, Postman AU, Teenage AU, The 80s AU, mailman!Bucky, mentions of internalized homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 15:47:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2738120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m sorry I didn’t write,” Bucky burst out. “I’m not… a letter writer.”</p><p>“A postman who doesn’t write letters,” Steve nodded.</p><p>"Yeah," was all Bucky said, because he was better at physics than Shakespeare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Postcards (Care of Brooklyn)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [so_shhy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/so_shhy/gifts).



> The darling [so_shhy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/so_shhy/pseuds/so_shhy) challenged me to write fluff from one of a number of prompts, and I chose "mailman(/woman) and person who receives a lot of mail AU". So to the best of my ability, here is a romance over a letterbox, between Bucky and Steve.

It was midsummer the day the slot of an apartment behind the launderette got its first letter. The gutters of Brooklyn were gulping dust. The whitewash was cracking on the few weatherboard shops that remained on the block. Basketballs thumped along the centerline of the streets and the boom boxes were blasting Public Enemy for all of New York to hear. As Bucky whipped around the kids on his bike, the smells in the air changed like a dealer flicking through cards; stewing tomatoes, hot tar, uncollected bins going bad. His hair flew too-long behind him like a cape. 

Bucky was seventeen and a bit, three months out of his high schools exams and never going back. Dad was looking hard for work but they needed the money at home, for his little sisters who were growing up smarter than him anyway, but man did it still sting. He was smart too, his teachers said; but they needed the money at home, so that was the end of it. The postie job paid adult wages and didn’t make him cut his hair. And it was safer than working at the docks. 

The apartment behind the launderette was on Bucky’s route, but it had never been on his radar. It was a squashed unit, smaller than the two-bedroom places that were stacked throughout the rest of the brick tower, filling up the space between them and the half-level basement behind the launderette. The apartment used to have grimy windows and pink, lace curtains, though Bucky didn’t know that. But that day the curtains were gone, the glass was newly cleaned, and a letter from the tenancy department had SARAH ROGERS at 75-1A printed behind the plastic window.

Most of the apartments got their mail through slots beside the big front doors, but there was no 1A on the little bronze labels. Bucky had just rolled the bike along the footpath balancing on one pedal, tucking the letter into the RETURN TO SENDER pocket of his bag, when he looked down the next alley and saw the short flight of battered, wooden steps that climbed up the back of the launderette. There was a letterbox at the top with a winking 1A screwed to its front. Bucky turned the bike and jumped off it as the front wheel touched the bottom step, leaping up the stairs three at a time and sliding the letter home.

There was a window at the top of the steps that allowed him to look right into the apartment, which he did without really meaning to. No more than a glance, but he was startled to see there was a boy on the other side of the glass. Blonde and underfed-looking, kneeling on a bed so he could rest his elbows on the sill on the far side. He was in a pale blue, over-starched shirt, and there were taped boxes stacked behind him in the bedroom. Bucky held his gaze for only a moment.

Embarrassed to be caught in his duties – as if he were Santa or the tooth fairy – Bucky turned and jumped back onto his bike, peeling off down the road as fast as he could.

 

\---

 

He delivered letters often enough to 1A, and often enough that summer the kid heard his footsteps on the stairs and appeared in the window, usually with a book in his hand and the glass open to let heat and the flies in.

“Thanks,” he would say to Bucky when he came up the steps, and Bucky would shrug and disappear. He wondered why the kid wasn’t out playing basketball with the rest of them. Maybe he was from a Very Godly Family that didn't want him messing with urban children. Maybe he had allergies. Bucky’s mom said you caught allergies if you stayed inside too much.

“You ever go outside, dude?” Bucky asked the kid one day, pausing at the top of the stairs.

“I used to go to the park from our old place,” said the kid. “But the buses don’t run from here to there. I wish I had a bike.”

“Well, you can’t have my bike,” replied Bucky.

“Yours is too big anyway,” the kid stuck his skinny arm out the window. “I’m Steve.”

“Bucky,” he replied, and pointed back at the street. “I gotta finish my shift.”

 

\---

 

Once school started without Bucky, he didn’t expect to see Steve again, but only a couple of weeks after the streets had cleared out of kids he found Steve back at the window. He pulled himself up to the glass just as Bucky thumped up the rickety steps. He looked bleached-out, and his hair was damply stuck to his forehead.

He waved at Bucky with a laboured smile, and Bucky waved back.

Steve wasn’t at the window when he delivered a letter a fortnight later, but he was there the week after that, coughing into his fist as he pushed open the peeling window frame. Bucky leaned away from him in case it was contagious. He still had the letter in his hand and he recognized the crest in the corner. A public institution, run-down and short on books. Bucky had gone there until Dad shifted them into the zone for the uptown colleges.

“Your school’s writing to you,” he handed the letter through the window. “Maybe you should look at it before your Mom does.”

Steve winced as he ripped an end off the envelope. “It’ll be a warning about my physics grades,” he wheezed. “Too many sick days.”

“What you up to?” Bucky asked.

“Junior year.”

It came as a surprise; the kid must be almost as old as Bucky, unless he’d been bumped up a grade. Bucky had shot up half a foot in the last two years, and grown what felt like the same across the shoulders. He had a speckle of scrub on his cheeks too that he took pains to cultivate. But Steve must be well late for the puberty boat. Now that Bucky looked close, he had a lump sticking out in his throat and an angle to his chin that said he was chasing it down.

“Study harder,” Bucky recommended, and went down the steps.

 

\---

 

Mailbags were heavy, but they were a hell of a lot heavier with a junior year physics textbook in it. Steve wasn't at the window today, so Bucky managed to wedge the book into the package shelf at the back of the letterbox. He'd spent the night before sorting through his physics notes and pinning them to the relevant pages, and the textbook was now bulging like a greedy animal that had shoved too much food in its mouth to chew. Nevertheless, it stayed where Bucky left it when he backed away from the letterbox, hands held out in caution. He biked off with his satchel lighter and his heart pounding.

When he visited the mailbox at 75-1A the next day, Steve was sitting on his bed with a blanket around his shoulders and Bucky's old textbook propped between his knees. 

"Thank you!" he called through the glass when he heard Bucky's footsteps and looked up.

"Just delivering the mail," grunted Bucky as he turned to go.

"Wait - I know you're busy - but -" Steve clambered across the bedspread to the window, dragging his blanket with him like a cloak. He shoved the frame up. "What are gamma radiation and radiowaves made out of? They talk about the wavelengths but they never say." 

"They're made of photons," said Bucky, who was pretty sure the textbook _did_ say that, and it was obvious anyway. But then, he had trouble figuring out a single line of Shakespeare even when all of the words were familiar. Everyone had different strengths. "Like light. They're light we can't see. It's all the same stuff with different energies."

"Really?" Steve beamed. "That makes sense!"

"I gotta finish my run," muttered Bucky. "See you round." 

 

\---

 

The winds came slicing through the streets as winter filled the city. Mud ran in the gutters and splattered up the back of Bucky’s mail sack. The cold crept its finger in to press against his skin even through his parka, his dad’s big, blue scarf, and the wool hat tugged almost over his eyes. He had fingerless gloves at first so he could still feel the gears and peel out the corners of letters from a stack, but by the end of each day his nails would go blue and his joints were stuck in the shape of the handlebars when he tried to let go. Now he wore another layer of gloves under the fingerless ones and just fumbled with everything.

There was one morning he dropped a letter off at the apartment behind the launderette. It had the power company’s address on the back and a big red OVERDUE on the front. Steve wasn’t there that day, but a couple of days later he was in his bedroom getting his bag together, hours late for school.

“Hey, man,” said Bucky, licking his bottom lip.

“Hey,” said Steve, without his usual smile, shadows under his eyes as he tightened the straps on his beat-up rucksack.

“Hey, I couldn’t help noticing your, uh, your bills,” Bucky glanced around. “You know downtown, you can go fill out forms for housing assistance. Their offices share a break-room with the mail guys, they're cool.”

Steve looked up at him sharply. “Hey, man, Mom and I don’t need charity!”

“It ain’t charity,” Bucky blustered, going redder beneath his windburnt cheeks. “You think it’s charity that I deliver mail so my kid sisters can go to school? Man, fuck off, it’s my job. And it’s the Big Man’s job to look after the rest of us. Ain’t you read Trotsky? Ever heard of Tom Kahn and Rustin? You gotta read more, man.”

Steve was staring at him, and there was fresh colour in his cheeks too. Bucky’s throat seized up and his jaw clacked shut. He jumped on his bike and screeched off along the wet concrete.

 

\---

 

Steve was at the window a lot less the second half of winter, and the lights were almost always on inside the apartment behind the launderette. There are new, thick curtains hanging up, too. Once, there was a copy of Trotsky's _Literature and Revolution_ sitting on the window sill, clearly displayed for any passer-by who might be visiting. Or delivering letters. The day he saw it, Bucky caught himself whistling as he biked back up the alley. 

Bucky switched his shift to the afternoon mail drop, even though it meant he had less time to go steal beers and kick a ball around with the other blokes from his block. He told Mom it was so that he didn't get out of bed as early, but he wasn't fooling himself: it was because Steve was home from school most afternoons. He looked healthier than he had earlier in the year, moving with the energy of a proton on the red end of the scale rather than the blue, and a swiftness that his lithe weight no doubt granted him. They said hello often, snatching a line of conversation here and there, often carried on over several days. Bucky saw the study notes appearing around Steve’s room and the strained muscles in the corner of his mouth when exams finally came around. And when his results came in the mail, Bucky handed them over and waited while Steve ripped open the envelope and melted back against his pillows with a grin on his face.

“Passed physics?” Bucky grunted.

“Bee-plus,” Steve beamed.

 

\---

 

Then in late spring - or maybe it was early summer - came a couple of weeks when Steve was at the window every day, the slider shoved up to the top and his arms folded on the sill. He would lean out right when Bucky’s bike went past, and call, “What, no letters today?”

“Nothing today,” Bucky would slow down and salute.

He began to wonder what Steve was looking for. He could have been walking to the park, or off loitering around the record stores, but instead he sat at home on his bed watching the letterbox. Why?

There was a bit of junk mail on the fourteenth day. Bucky’s hand shook as he took it out of his satchel. He went up the creaking stairs, convinced that they would collapse beneath him. Steve was waiting at the window. He was looking at Bucky with wide eyes.

“Are you waiting for something?” Bucky asked.

“Yeah,” Steve grinned. In the first sunlight of summer his mousy hair look luminous. There was a faint, petulant brush of stubble along the line of his jaw, and Bucky couldn’t let go of his gaze.

Bucky leaned over the sill and kissed him.

Steve’s mouth was cool and wet, like winter was refusing to let him go. A shudder ran through him. Bucky pulled away and saw that his eyes were wide and his bottom lip hanging open, unsmiling. Without breaking Bucky's gazy he put out his hands and sank onto his bed, away from the sunlight and into the yellow glow of his bedroom lamp.

Bucky took a step backwards, stumbling slightly on the wooden landing that were slick with a patina of rot. He caught himself and took the stairs three at a time, jumping on his bike and cycling away as fast as he could.

He didn’t remember the rest of his route that day. He didn’t remember whether he’d even finished the deliveries. He didn't care. 

 

\---

 

Bucky ran over it all in his head that night, unable to sleep. Perhaps he’d run away needlessly. Perhaps Steve had just been surprised, but not disgusted. And hadn't he said - with what Bucky was convinced had been a flirtatious whisper - hadn't he agreed that he was waiting there for someone? Or had Bucky said ‘something’? He couldn't remember.

What else would Steve have been waiting for? Why else would he have been watching the letterbox? 

 

\---

 

The answer came on his deliveries the next day, when he reached Steve’s block and tugged out a letter to 75-1A.

The envelope was heavy, cream paper, with a black, inky crest of simple design. The return address was in Chicago. _School of the Art_. Bucky didn’t know art schools. But he knew fancy institutes when he saw them. He stared at it for a long time, his hand gripping so tight he almost bent the paper. He looked at the stairs of the apartment behind the launderette. They look like the steps to a guillotine platform. He wheeled his bike towards them slowly. The window was open. Maybe Steve wasn’t there. Maybe he was just airing out the room.

Bucky ran up the steps as fast as he could, jamming the letter into the letterbox.

“Hey!”

Bucky caught a glimpse of Steve through the window, but he didn’t make eye contact. He bolted for his bike, his head aching and stomach whirling.

 

\---

 

The next day there was another letter for the apartment behind the launderette. It was just a bill, and Bucky considered dropping it into the wrong box in the hope that one of the building’s other tenants would be kind enough to deliver it for him. But Dad always told him to stand up and apologise for his mistakes. If Steve thought him a coward as well as a – a you-know – that would surely be worse. Steve might become afraid of him. It must be terrifying to think that somebody wanted you, and knew where you slept.

Bucky walked up the steps slowly. A pair of skinny legs with lumpy, pink knees hung out the window, with five skinny fingers on either side of them. Steve was sitting on the windowsill. He smiled at Bucky as he watched him push the bill into the letterbox. Bucky found himself glaring back from under his helmet and his dark fringe. Did he think this was funny?

“Still waiting for confirmation to Chicago?” Bucky asked, trying to sound casual rather than angry. He wasn’t angry at Steve. He was angry at himself. “Got onto the waiting list?”

“Nope. I’m in. Full scholarship,” Steve grinned. “They’re taking me a year early, too. I’m leaving in September.”

“Oh,” said Bucky. He folded his arms. “Then what are you waiting for now?”

Steve leaned so far off the window that if Bucky hadn’t reached up and grabbed his arms, he would have toppled right off; but Bucky didn’t notice the weight of him, because Steve was pressing his mouth to Bucky’s and kissing him back.   
Bucky stepped forward, letting Steve get his balance on the windowsill once again. As the kid slowly drew away, Bucky opened his eyes. He was gasping for breath. A grin twitched at the corner’s of Steve’s mouth.

“All this time,” he laughed. “I thought I was just making up stories about the postboy. I never thought they'd come true.”

 

\---

 

Steve went away to art school. In October, Bucky was doing his usual deliveries when he got to Steve’s block and found that there was one piece of mail for 75-1A: a postcard with a hand-painted watercolour of a crow on the front. Its black eyes shone with a liquid spark, alive and intelligent. Bucky flicked it over and read the address on the other side:

FOR BUCKY  
c/o 75-1A 86th ST  
BROOKLYN  
NY, NY

The text on the back of the postcard read simply, _From Steve_. Bucky glanced around and then tucked the little card into his ‘Return to Sender’ pocket. That night he took it out and pinned it up on the inside of his wardrobe. The crow watched him when he opened the door the next morning.

Every week a next postcard came. At first it was all birds – a delicate wren, a brash oriole building a nest, a meadowlark with its chest puffed up in song. Then, perhaps as winter drove the birds away or as Steve’s studies directed his eyes elsewhere, it became other subjects. whimsical cartoons or fanciful creatures: a half-monkey with a fawn’s hooves and circus hoops, a flying dragon covered in thick, feline fur, a humanoid alien running across the surface of a pond. Sometimes it was picturesque sights from Chicago: food trucks and squashed church with rainbow glass windows. For three weeks it was silhouettes of people passing between the shelves of libraries and folio benches like ghosts. Once there was a daring still-life of a muscled youth reclining, naked, on an art studio platform surrounded by easels. Once it was a NY postman on a bike, his long, dark hair flying out behind him, but Bucky could not believe the straight-backed, soft-jawed figure was supposed to be him. It must be some other postie that Steve had been watching.

There was never a message longer than a few words written on the back, so Bucky absorbed the images without context, imagining Steve’s wiry hands tugging the sketches from white space like a magician's wand. The postcards grew so numerous that Bucky had to overlap them slightly like roof tiles in order to fit them all into the inside of his wardrobe. He leaned in close to watch Steve's brushstrokes in the watercolours become more confident and excitable. He traced his fingers across the cartoons, as over the months, the shapes of Steve’s figures became more abstract and consistent like they were being smoothed by successive rounds on a potter’s wheel. 

On each postcard, underneath the Brooklyn address, was the number of a student accommodation hall. But though sometimes Bucky sat down with a piece of his mother’s Christmas-letter stationary, he couldn’t think what to write. He'd never had to write letters before, except to thank Granny for birthday presents when he'd been a kid. He certainly didn't know what to write to Steve. And after a while, he felt that he'd left it so long that Steve must surely be offended, or at least have assumed that Bucky had lost interest. Nobody would keep painting such beautiful things and posting them into the ether with no response. 

The pictures kept coming, through the biting autumn and a soaking winter, but Bucky was sure they were a mere habit. Still, he looked forward to them every shift, a safe and delightful secret to carry home at the end of the day.

 

\---

 

Dad’s new job gave him a raise, the family account books went from red to black, and all of a sudden they didn’t need the money at home as much as they had before. It was spring again, and Bucky thought of the long summer stretching ahead. There was a course he could start next semester at nightschool, that would let him finish his high school diploma. He could keep working until then, but he’d been saving a third of his paycheck all this year so he didn't really need the income. Instead he thought about buying a new knapsack and catching a bus to anywhere he liked; Los Angeles, Acadia, the Grand Canyon, maybe even San Fran… see the sights, spend his money, hitchhike home with holes in his shoes. Once he had his diploma, friends from school had promised to find him a job in an office somewhere. This was the decade to make money, people said. This was the time for the little guy to have big dreams.

He handed in his two-week notice just before the kids got out on their holidays. It wasn’t until then, the first of the last days on the postie bike, that Bucky realised he still hadn’t written Steve back. In fact, he hadn’t heard from Steve in three or four weeks. Was the kid coming home for summer? Was he still living in a student hall, or had he moved into a house-share somewhere with his new, cool art school friends? Had he held his grades up enough to keep the scholarship? How did they even grade art, anyway? Bucky thought Steve’s art was better than anything he’d seen in museums, but he was no expert. 

Why had Bucky left it so long to write? He wasn’t going to have an excuse to bike past the kid’s house anymore. All of a sudden, this alarmed him. He had no other way of finding Steve except for that window behind the launderette. He decided he’d have to figure out where Steve was. He’d go up and knock on the door, and if it was Steve’s mom he’d introduce himself as a friend – maybe a friend from Chicago – and ask for his new address.

Every morning when he got on his bike, he told himself that’s what he’d do.

But every day when he go to number 75, he biked on past. He couldn’t make himself turn off down the alley. He couldn’t stop his heart racing and the bile rising in his throat. What if Steve didn’t want to see him? He barely knew Bucky! Hell, he didn’t know Bucky at _all_. He’d been flirting, the way young people always flirt, especially kids like Steve whose moms made them stay inside all day. He didn’t really know what he was doing. If Bucky tried to make anything of it, it would be awkward, it would be awful, and Bucky would have ruined his safe, delightful secret forever. He’d never be able to look at the pictures in his wardrobe again. He’d never be able to imagine what might be, what might-have-been, because he’d know the truth.

But he couldn’t live with might-have-beens. Not with his life looking long and grey ahead of him, a high school diploma and an office job and probably a one-room apartment behind a launderette. Safe and warm and friendless.

Bucky decided that the next time he had a letter for 75-1A, he’d go and knock on the door.

 

\---

 

There wasn’t a letter that day. There wasn’t one the next day, either. Bucky had less than a week left on this postal route. With only five days left, he didn’t let himself check as soon as he got his mail bag. He waited until he was up to number 75, posting bills and hand-written envelopes into the apartment boxes at the front of the building, and waited for 1A to appear in his hands. But there was nothing for 75-1A.

Day four, nothing.

Day three, nothing.

Day two, nothing.

Day one.

Bucky felt as if he was biking underwater as he entered Steve’s block. He let out a long, slow breath as he filed the letters into the mailboxes of 75, checking each one carefully for 1A. One by one they disappeared, and his hand closed on the next building’s letters in his bag.

There was nothing for 1A.

Bucky got back on his bike. He told himself to turn down the alley, but instead he pushed off from the curb. The wheels spun, but he didn’t realise he was pedaling. He felt as if he was just being carried forward past the drain-holes and hatchbacks with rust around their wheels. His brain was shouting at him to go around the corner to the apartment behind the launderette, but he couldn’t even bring himself to look. There was no more post to deliver. He was never coming back here. It wasn’t meant to be. 

“Hey!”

The yell jabbed through the fog and made Bucky look back over his shoulder. There was someone standing at the mouth to the alley behind him, someone tall with golden-blonde hair. Bucky frowned and squeezed the brakes, swinging the bike around to roll up onto the footpath.

Steve was leaning against the brick corner just inside the alley that led to 1A, hands tucked into the pockets of his blue jeans. It seemed the puberty boat had arrived at last. He was broad across the shoulders and long in the legs, and his face had filled out into square lines framing a nervous smile.

“Hey, man,” said Bucky. He swallowed and his mind flattened into an empty horizon. Finally he managed to dredge up, “How was art school?”

“Art school is great,” said Steve. “I’m back for the whole summer.”

Bucky gripped his handlebars tighter. “I got your postcards. They were cool.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t write,” Bucky burst out. “I’m not… a letter writer.”

“A postman who doesn’t write letters,” Steve nodded.

"Yeah," was all Bucky said, because he was better at physics than Shakespeare.

Steve licked his bottom lip, and Bucky's legs jellied so fast he nearly fell off his bike. The empty summer in his head was suddenly as big as the country from coast to coast, full of glorious worlds waiting to be discovered and long, straight roads with cash in his pocket and maybe, maybe someone to spend it with. Someone to fill the seat next to him on the bus. Someone to help put up a tent in the desert. Someone to rate the pie in every diner between here and California. And Bucky could buy all the paper and watercolours Steve wanted, spend every spare dime he had, so that Steve could capture it all, and send it back home on postcards until they could saunter back into Brooklyn come the new semester and assemble a map of the continent with them. A summer of colour.

Steve jerked his thumb at the familiar, wooden steps. “You wanna come in for coffee?”

“I can’t,” said Bucky. “I have to finish my shift. It’s my last day.”

“Okay,” Steve shrugged, and turned back towards 1A, running one idle hand along the bricks. The muscles flexed beneath his college jacket. He glanced back with one last smile. “Come by when you’re done, yeah?"

"Yeah," said Bucky again.

Steve's voice floated back to him as he jogged up the stairs. "Just whenever. You know where I live.”


End file.
